Hull man envisions distillery using local ingredients in Hingham

In a drab cinder-block building in South Hingham, Bobby Rohla is thinking about potatoes. Rohla, a lawyer from North Dakota who now lives in Hull, wants to use whole potatoes from Western Massachusetts to make his own locally-produced vodka and as the base for a gin, which he hopes to make from botanicals grown in Scituate...

In a drab cinder-block building in South Hingham, Bobby Rohla is thinking about potatoes.

Rohla, a lawyer from North Dakota who now lives in Hull, wants to use whole potatoes from Western Massachusetts to make his own locally-produced vodka and as the base for a gin, which he hopes to make from botanicals grown in Scituate. He also envisions making a line of of eau de vie, a clear fruit brandy, made from fruit grown on the South Shore.

“People like to know where stuff comes from,” said Rohla, who is working to open a small-batch spirit producer called the Bradford Distillery in Hingham later this year. “I really think they really do. And I think they like to know the people who make it.”

Rohla is still seeking building permits for the project from the town, but he’s confident he’ll be able to navigate federal and state regulations to get his licenses once he gets the town’s OK. He hopes to be able to start selling his own vodka and gin in local restaurants and liquor stores this fall.

Once it opens, Bradford Distillery would be one of only about a dozen licensed distilleries in the state and only the second on the South Shore, which is also home to the Dirty Water Distillery in Plymouth. By comparison, Massachusetts is home to 44 licensed beer breweries.

While only a tiny fraction of the liquor consumed in the United States is produced in small-batch distilleries, industry experts say craft distillers are about to see a renaissance similar to the one that propelled the proliferation of craft breweries a decade ago. Consumers, they say, are looking to buy products made close to home, whether they’re shopping at a farmers’ market or the liquor store.

“It happened in bread, coffee, wine, beer and now it’s our turn,” said Bill Owens, founder and president of the American Distilling Institute.

Rohla, a lawyer by training, said he first got interested in distilling a few years ago while doing legal work for some of the small-batch distilleries trying to get a foothold in Louisville, Ky, a city that has been dominated by the major liquor producers since prohibition.

When legal work dried up around 2007, Rohla developed a plan for opening a large-scale distillery on his family’s farm in North Dakota. But he eventually determined that the numbers for the project wouldn’t work and decided instead to move to the South Shore and work on a smaller project with his uncle, Bradford Selland, who shares his interest in distilling.

Rohla said his focus at the Bradford Distillery would be on all-local ingredients, from the potatoes that would be mashed, cooked down, fermented and distilled into vodka, to the fruits and botanicals that would go into his gin and eau de vie. He also hopes to produce a whiskey aged in port and bourbon barrels, but it wouldn’t be ready for 10 years or so.

Page 2 of 2 - Rohla plans to grow the botanicals at his uncle’s property in Scituate and hopes to eventually buy some land in Western Massachusetts to grow the fruit for his eau de vie. He also relishes the idea of experimenting and using produce from people’s backyards on the South Shore.

“If somebody has some stuff they want to put into the process, we’d be happy to buy it from them, cause I think that’s kind of fun,” he said. “We can put that on the bottle: ‘This came from Joe Smith’s backyard potato patch.’”

Leo Keka, owner of Alba in Quincy, said he’d like to be among the first to offer the spirits. He said he already stocks a rum make by an Ipswich distillery called Privateer and has found that customers like the idea of a locally-made spirit.

“Anything that’s local seems to be a huge hit for us,” he said. “The locals seem to support it.”